Casting a Movement

The Welcome Table Initiative

Claire Syler, Daniel Banks, Claire Syler, Daniel Banks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429948275
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Casting a Movement brings together US-based actors, directors, educators, playwrights, and scholars to explore the cultural politics of casting.

Drawing on the notion of a "welcome table"—a space where artists of all backgrounds can come together as equals to create theatre—the book's contributors discuss casting practices as they relate to varying communities and contexts, including Middle Eastern American theatre, Disability culture, multilingual performance, Native American theatre, color- and culturally-conscious casting, and casting as a means to dismantle stereotypes. Syler and Banks suggest that casting is a way to invite more people to the table so that the full breadth of US identities can be reflected onstage, and that casting is inherently a political act; because an actor's embodied presence both communicates a dramatic narrative and evokes cultural assumptions associated with appearance, skin color, gender, sexuality, and ability, casting choices are never neutral. By bringing together a variety of artistic perspectives to discuss common goals and particular concerns related to casting, this volume features the insights and experiences of a broad range of practitioners and experts across the field.

As a resource-driven text suitable for both practitioners and academics, Casting a Movement seeks to frame and mobilize a social movement focused on casting, access, and representation.

Chapter 2 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Part I

Culturally conscious casting

Chapter 1

The chasm between

Ayanna Thompson

In May 2018, co-editor Claire Syler talked with Ayanna Thompson about casting, race, classical theater, and education. Thompson is a leading scholar of Shakespeare and classical performance, and her edited collection, Colorblind Shakespeare (Thompson 2006), analyzes the practice of colorblind casting and Shakespearean performance. Thompson’s work has inspired a variety of artists and scholars, and her ideas inform “The Welcome Table: Casting for an Integrated Society” (Banks 2013).

When I worked on the anthology Colorblind Shakespeare, which is now over a decade ago, I thought that, finally, we’ll have this dialogue about colorblind casting and Shakespearean performance and then it’ll be done. I thought if I addressed the book to actors and directors and some Shakespeare scholars that that would be enough. And it just wasn’t. It started a dialogue about casting and Shakespeare. But the anthology didn’t achieve what I assumed it would achieve—a definitive end to the debates—and I think part of it was my own limitations. I hadn’t clearly worked out good defining terms that would be clear. And also, at that point, I didn’t really take into consideration the audience’s role in how performance works. I was focused on the production end of performance and not focused enough on the reception end. So my work has somewhat veered toward reception—and part of that got me thinking more clearly about the role that education plays in preparing audiences to understand Shakespeare. Because it’s not enough if we have forward thinking actors, directors, and theater companies. If your audience doesn’t understand what’s going on, or your audience comes in with a different set of expectations, or your audience is highly resistant to whatever discourse you want to put forward onstage, then ultimately the production won’t be as successful. I kept circling around non-traditional casting and realized, “Oh, more informed dialogues about race and performance can only be achieved if we alter the way we teach Shakespeare.”

So that’s how I ended up thinking about the science of learning, the new generation of learners, and their expectations about not only their education, but the ways they are approaching race and dialogues around race. I think, in many ways, it is an incoherent dialogue. Because, on the one hand, students espouse a rhetoric of colorblindness and a “can’t we be done with that kind of thing” perspective. And then, on the other hand, they really, really crave honest, clearly articulated dialogues about race and racial difference. It took me a while to see that everything I’m interested in around casting and race and classical productions means that we have to take into account education—we have to take into account audience development and then we have to take into account the production side. So we can’t ignore any of those components because, otherwise, the performance will fail. And I’ve seen many productions that have great lofty goals and ultimately fail because one of those components is missing.

Take the example of Prospero from The Tempest. Theatrically, revenge looks really different when expressed by different bodies. The Tempest has a different cultural valence if it is a White Prospero or Black Prospero or Asian Prospero and taking into account the gender identity of the actor. The whole idea of exacting revenge and being powerful with the tools of books and magic together have different meanings depending on the body cast in the role. And I think that’s the part of the dialogue that, for me coming up in the Shakespeare world, was missing. Because I never assume that one’s body can be read in a colorblind fashion, I felt that I was constantly seeing a different play than my fellow audience members who seemed reluctant to admit that the race of the bodies onstage mattered. So, at some point, I decided to acknowledge it publicly in my work—“I’m experiencing something differently in my reception than the rest of the audience.” And so what does that mean? Can there be a dialogue about those different ways of seeing? Because there are moments when people don’t see “race.”

This recognition is why I was excited to co-write Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose with education specialist Laura Turchi because, when I talked to professional actors and asked them about their training—“What discourses did you have when you were being trained? Did you only have ‘colorblind’ productions in your training?”—the answer was, “Yes.” Unless it’s A Raisin in the Sun or August Wilson. But then I responded, “That didn’t really set you up for a career, did it?” So the big “aha” moment I had was, “Why aren’t educators using those moments when incorporating performance into the classroom? Whether it is with juniors and seniors in high school, or even freshmen and sophomores in college—let alone specific actor training programs—why aren’t instructors using classroom performance opportunities to say to students, “Yes, your body matters—your body matters in any performance that you’re going to do”? Can the class have a collective dialogue about how students want their embodied presence, or not want it, to matter in this specific context?

It’s incredibly important to give students the tools to decide, collectively, what kind of casting practices they want to use in their educational settings. And to acknowledge that classroom casting doesn’t have to be what students think casting should be in every setting—like professional or amateur productions. In fact, it is empowering for students to realize that the casting practices they want to experiment with in the classroom do not have to replicate and/or replace what they have experienced in professional settings. But, in this classroom and in this moment, how do students want bodies to be taken into account or not? This kind of question can allow for a much richer discussion with students about interpretation and meaning-making—and this question also allows for a discussion about the difference between the intention of a production and the reception of a production. In other words, through the practice of casting in the classroom, students will alternate between being the ones with the vision of the intention and being the ones watching and interpreting the decisions others have made. Because, of course, the chasm between a production’s intention and its reception can be quite large at times. It’s incredibly illuminating when students realize that what they assumed would be a clear intention is not received in that fashion.

Bibliography

Banks, Daniel. 2013. “The Welcome Table: Casting for an Integrated Society.” Theatre Topics, 23(1) ( March): 1–18.

Thompson, Ayanna. 2006. Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance. New York: Routledge.

Thompson, Ayanna, and Laura Turchi. 2016. Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centred Approach. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare.

Chapter 2

Playing with “race” in the new millennium

Justin Emeka

When I was accepted into graduate school for directing, I received a suggested reading list of plays and authors that terrified me. I was not terrified by the amount of reading, but by the number of White authors I might be expected to direct. Although I liked some of the plays, culturally speaking, I did not feel much connection to these texts and I resisted the idea of using them to develop my skills as a director. I feared that they might somehow force me to compromise my passion and/or purpose as a Black artist.

The fear must have been on my face when they introduced me during orientation because, afterwards, I was approached by one of the professors who had helped recruit me. She invited me to her office and told me, “Don’t be scared, Justin. You are here because of the strength of your individuality, not in spite of it. I know that you know who you are, and so you will never lose yourself inside this education. In fact, I believe that you will find a way for it to make you stronger.” Her words and conviction gave me the confidence I needed to begin to read the plays from that suggested reading list and learn to see the possibilities for staging them through the cultural lens of my own legacy.

Three years later, I directed my thesis production of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, re-imagining my production in the South just after the Civil War. Though I kept Shakespeare’s language, characters, and plot largely intact, I created a unique backstory using historical research and set the action in and around a once majestic plantation house. In my interpretation, Macbeth was a White Northern general completing a brutal military campaign to win the war. Lady Macbeth was a Southern belle, with whom he had recently fallen in love and married. Although she sincerely loved Macbeth, Lady Macbeth despised the Northern King Duncan, a charismatic Lincoln-like figure, whose demise she was eager to plot. Macbeth’s best friend and comrade in arms, Banquo, was a Black Union soldier. Although equal to Macbeth in intelligence, merit, and experience, Banquo remained under Macbeth’s command. The witches were newly freed African slaves who still lived an impoverished life as servants in the house and in the fields. At night, they were sustained by their ancestral rhythms and spiritual faith that allowed them to see beyond the present and into the past and future. Through ritual and possession, the witches foretold Macbeth’s ascent to the throne, as well as the ultimate succession of Banquo’s seed—Black kings claiming power for many generations to come.

As a result of the success of that production over twelve years ago, I have continued to develop productions throughout my career that re-imagine the function of “race” in plays such as Death of a Salesman, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Glass Menagerie, and Romeo and Juliet. My purpose with this essay is to illustrate how I developed my process as a director for re-imagining race while incorporating Black and Brown actors in “classical” plays by White or European authors. I accomplish this approach by:

• re-interpreting the text through a Black or Brown experience;
• finding ways to support that interpretation with creative and historical cultural references;
• and using archetypes to help actors shape characters that can transform the expectations of both artists and audiences.

Through this process I create new opportunities that can provide actors of color access to a legacy of Eurocentric theater that, for many years, has remained culturally exclusive. As theaters and schools work to find ways to engage contemporary audiences by being more inclusive, in addition to producing plays by writers of color, it is also important to invite different cultural lenses into the process of staging plays by White authors that continue to be widely studied and produced year after year. In doing so, audiences and artists discover important new perspectives, new relevance, and new possibilities in performing great texts from the past.

Recognizing “race”

In “The Welcome Table: Casting for an Integrated Society,” Daniel Banks argues, “because of the continued discussion of race in US society, racialism (accepting and acting according to a system of so-called racial difference) and racism (discrimination according to presumed race, often based on appearance) are ever present” (Banks 2013, 3). Race is an abstract and elusive idea which makes it challenging for many people to discuss. Sometimes race is a reference to physical features such as skin color or hair texture or lip fullness; sometimes race is a reference to place of birth or parents’ birth; sometimes race is a reference to language, religion, or behavior. Within the context of this essay, I use the term “Black people” broadly and inclusively to refer to all those with African ancestry. I use the term “Brown people” to refer to communities from the Americas and Asia that have had limited or no access to systemic “White privilege.”

Scientifically, it has been proven that there are only extremely small genetic differences that separate us as human beings or warrant the racial distinctions that we have come to rely on in distinguishing the world’s population. That is to say, scientifically, there is only one race—the human race (Bonilla-Silva 2010, 8). Nevertheless, from generation to generation, race has continued to play a significant role in how people in the United States construct identity and, in turn, as a concept, race greatly informs how and who theaters cast in their season of plays. Therefore, placing Black and Brown bodies in roles originally imagined for White actors potentially raises complex questions that actors, directors, and audiences must learn to address.

Figure 2.1 The three witches inviting Macbeth. Production photo from Macbeth by William Shakespeare at Oberlin College in 2010. Directed by Justin Emeka.

Photo by John T. Seyfried.

In 1996 August Wilson delivered his famous address, “The Ground on Which I Stand,” to the Theatre Communications Group National Conference in Princeton, NJ, where he vehemently denounced the casting of Black actors in so called “colorblind” productions:

Colorblind casting is an aberrant idea that has never had any validity other than as a tool of the Cultural Imperialists who view American culture, rooted in the icons of European culture, as beyond reproach in its perfection … For a Black actor to stand on the stage as part of a social milieu that has denied him his gods, his culture, his humanity, his mores, his ideas of himself and the world he lives in, is to be in league with a thousand nay-sayers who wish to corrupt the vigor and spirit of his heart.

(Wilson 2001, 22)

When I first read a transcription of August Wilson’s address shortly after he delivered it, I had recently graduated from college and was struggling to find my place and purpose in the US theater. Wilson’s words helped me realize that part of my struggle as a Black artist was the result of inheriting a canon of “classical” plays written by White men that mainly explore and celebrate some variation of White life. Thinking on my own experience growing up as an actor of color in “colorblind” high school productions, I realized how Black and Brown actors were often consciously and/or sub-consciously conditioned to hide their ethnicities in rehearsal rooms in order to fit into the world of the play. This process usually began in the audition, where the handful o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of contributors
• Foreword: From “I Love Your Freckles” to “Representation Matters”
• Introduction
• The welcome table: Casting for an integrated society
• PART I: Culturally conscious casting
• PART II: Approaches to casting Middle Eastern American theater
• PART III: Casting and disability culture
• PART IV: Casting and multilingual performance
• PART V: Casting contemporary Native American theater
• PART VI: Subverting stereotypes
• PART VII: Casting across identities
• Afterword
• Index